Oracle Funds Anti-Google Effort that Outs Hillary, Obama

Kimberly White / GettyCHRISS W. STREET21 Aug 2016Newport Beach, CA

The Oracle Corporation is using its deep financial resources to fund the “Google Transparency Project,” which has set up headquarters in Washington, D.C. with a mission to “out” Google’s dicey lobbying practices and expose crony relationships with President Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

With Google demonstrating its political clout by essentially writing the “Net Neutrality” regulatory language, Oracle and others are stepping up funding for a Silicon Valley attack dog to level the playing field.

In the twelve weeks proceeding the “Net Neutrality” vote, Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt functioned as one of the 11 members on the “Democratic Victory Task Force,” according to a document leaked by the Naked Capitalism blog. Schmidt helped craft the “National Narrative Project” to serve as the key strategy for the Democratic Party to “fight to reclaim state houses, win governorships, take back the House and Senate and protect the White House.” He is also a leading force behind ‘FWD.US,’ a Silicon Valley tech community effort to push open-borders immigration reform.

As a demonstration of just how powerful Google’s relationship with Washington had become, the week before the February 2015 vote by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve a wildly controversial “Net Neutrality” Internet regulatory regime, Google was uniquely given a copy of the 332-page draft document and then met with FCC Chairman Wheeler and the FCC’s two other Democratic commissioners, Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel. According to Politico‘s sources, Google was able to offer extraordinarily self-serving tweaks to the regulation just before the five-member Commission voted along party lines for the new rules.

A number of Silicon Valley’s tech giants have become concerned regarding the extent of Google’s growing power. But when a San Francisco jury decided in May that Google’s Android operating system did not have to pay $9 billion for infringing on Oracle’s 37 Java API patents under the “fair use” doctrine, Redwood City-based Oracle decided to start playing hardball in challenging Google’s reputation.

Following an August 18 Fortunearticle, Oracle proudly acknowledged that it is one of the funders of the ‘Google Transparency Project’ (GTP), which says it intends to use high-quality investigative journalism to document Google’s nefarious government influence. It is unclear who the other funders are, but GTP is a spin-off of the “Campaign for Accountability” and is at least associated with the deep-pocket ‘New Venture Fund.’

GTP has already produced a series of exposé reports about Google, including:

“Google’s White House Meetings,” which documents 427 White House visits for Google during the Obama Administration; 2) 363 meetings between White House officials and Google employees; and 3) 64 meetings involving employees of companies solely owned by Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. It also notes that 169 Google executives have officially met with 182 different White House officials.

“New data reveal extent of traffic between Google and the Obama Administration,” which identifies 258 instances of “revolving door” activity (involving 251 individuals) between Google, or related firms, and the federal government, Democrat political campaigns and Congress during the Obama administration. In a potential new scandal for Hillary Clinton, there were 18 former State Department officials that joined Google as executives, and five Google officials took up senior posts at the State Department.

GTP comments that it is currently working with Re/Code and The Intercept on the Obama administration using primarily ex-Googlers to set up the secretive “United States Digital Service” that the White House claims is pairing America’s “top technology talent with the best public servants to improve the usefulness and reliability of the country’s most important digital services.”